This story is fictional and intended for adults only.
Copyright, Boy Mercury X, 2024.
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Rough House by Boy Mercury X
In my high school there was a strictly enforced caste system, or there was when I was there, in 1980. I never thought that made my high school unique, among schools or civilizations. But I was mindful of it.
My parents were unlike the other parents, who had country club memberships and careers. My parents had mere jobs. Someone has to repair the cars and work in the grocery stores, right?
I was -- I was told -- lucky to receive my education at a school beyond my family's means. Oddly enough I was more studious than most, more reserved. It may have just been my nature. Or maybe I understood that I couldn't afford to make as many mistakes as my so-called peers, not having anything like their safety net.
I looked on the popular set with a mix of awe and resentment. Of them all the one I was most in awe of was Brandon Thomas. He had dirty blond hair that fell over his forehead in a swoop, and darker angled eyebrows and eyelashes. His cheeks and blunt nose were given to sunburn as the days warmed, before going golden brown and freckling.
He had an easy physicality, adept at all sports, and a warm laugh. He was constantly fidgeting, and I often saw him kicking a hackysack around. At the neck of his shirts, I could see a puka shell necklace, and thought for one night of getting one like it, but knew it would be ridiculous on me.
I was so enamored of Brandon Thomas that on the day just a few weeks before graduation that he randomly punched me in the hallway, I went home to look in the mirror at the purple bruise around my eye and got a hardon, thinking that Brandon Thomas had selected me for it
My parents were less enraptured. My mother insisted on a trip to urgent care. That was ridiculous enough, but she insisted also on additional costly testing, to be certain there was no damage to my eye. She'd heard of someone having a detached retina and was determined I'd make it to adulthood with all my parts intact.
The cost irritated my father, but not as much as my failure to honorably defend myself.
"Did you at least kick his ass?" he asked.
I cringed at the question. Ass kicking was not, as a rule, something that lower caste boys did to higher caste boys. More critically, it was not something generally done by boys whose hobbies featured reading Jane Austen.
"You can't let someone bully you," he went on.
I understood why he mistook Brandon for a bully. But I couldn't see how to correct him.
It's one of those ironies of parenting, I supposed, that he'd made such efforts for me to have a better, less scrappy childhood than his own, but then was so frustrated when I acted like it. And at eighteen I was pretty fully formed, and a little late to expect me to change much.
It must have shamed him, my ineptitude at fighting back. But it did not shame him enough to prevent him from calling Brandon Thomas's parents.
Brandon's parents balked at the idea of paying for my urgent care and eye exam visit. Paltry sums were not suitable subjects of conversation in their circles, and if my parents had inferior health insurance, why was that their problem? And who went to urgent care for a black eye? Brandon had no doubt incurred much worse injuries in lacrosse or crew and just walked them off.
When they said they could discuss it in person some time, my father leapt at the chance, saying we'd be right over, taking me with him.
"They didn't mean to really come," I told him. "They were just being polite!"
He couldn't understand how people like Brandon's parents communicated in hidden codes that were like ultraviolet light to my father, or like whistles only dogs could hear. Undetectable. He thought that like him, people simply said what they meant.
Mr. Thomas answered the door, and despite my mortification I had a burning desire to see how they lived. He greeted us warmly and asked us in. From the hall I spied a glimpse of their kitchen, with an amber colored refrigerator, the type with two side by side doors, and an ice dispenser.
He and my father shook hands, and he suggested we have a seat in what he called the rec room, a wood paneled getaway with a big TV, a stack of board games, an air hockey table and a bar.
Mr. Thomas asked if we'd like a beer or an iced tea. It felt rude to me to take anything from a family he was trying to shake down for medical costs, but my father said yes before I could decline. And as Mr. Thomas played bartender Mrs. Thomas and Brandon joined us.
Mr. Thomas handed my father a beer bottle, and me a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lemon in it. "Mike," he said, with a grin. My father raised an eyebrow, not knowing that I'd gone by Michael rather than Miguel at school.
I could see how much of his coloring and even features Brandon had inherited from his mother, though it came out as more handsome on him than pretty on her. He had a junior version of his father's physique, easy to see with him wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, exposing his shoulders and flanks. His skin was tawny and the hairs on his arms had gone so pale they were nearly white. The visible curve of his chest muscle exposed by his cut off sleeves taunted me.
Mr. Thomas, a lawyer, said it seemed we'd let some collateral damage resulting from some roughhousing escalate into something contentious. "Boys will be boys," he added, the most ancient of defenses for all manner of misbehavior.
He may have been brilliant in a court of law, but he'd miscalculated the argument in that setting. No one knew more acutely than my father that roughhousing was not in my lexicon of behaviors. I was tall, but lean, a capable runner and swimmer, but the suggestion of me roughhousing with other boys was as laughable as a racing greyhound tussling with pitbulls. And it could only remind my father of what an alien creature I was to him.
Still, the word gave me goosebumps, and made my underwear contort. It evoked images of rolling around with Brandon, in full contact, hands on arms and dicks grinding against each other, his few pale whiskers scratching my cheeks as we grappled and laughed together.
Sigh.
"All I know is there's a bill to be paid," my father said, resolutely.
He put his beer down on the coffee tabletop, near but not on the coaster. It wasn't a matter of defiance, just that we never used coasters in our home. He might have thought it was an upper-class decorative item.
It was Brandon who took up his own defense, in his own charming way.
"It would be a shame to let an accident come between two friends, don't you think?" he asked.
After a long silence I realized he was asking not my father but me, and -- to my bewilderment -- he meant us.
Brandon and I had been in high school together for most of four years, but we didn't know each other. We'd said maybe a dozen unmemorable words to each other, out of necessity. Sure, I might have mooned over him as a freshman, and daydreamed of confiding in each other some shared interests.
"I like looking at boys. You too? That's amazing!"
But it became clear we were in different leagues of school hierarchy, for many reasons.
I knew he'd gotten into trouble a few times and had to be bailed out by his parents. He wasn't a bully or a bad boy. Not really. He just had a mischievous streak, and some charm to smooth it over. I didn't even know why he hit me in the hallway. It was just one of the indignities meted out by the A list kids onto those at the bottom.
So I was nearly dumbstruck by his invitation to acknowledge us as friends.
The opportunity to be complicit in a lie with him, one known only to the two of us in all the world, was an intimacy as intoxicating as if he'd kissed me.
I would have given him a kidney if he wanted it.
Throwing my honor under the bus to provide him an alibi was the closest I could do. I wished it could have been more.
"Yeah," I said, fighting my own near-swoon. "It was just an accident."
My father looked incredulous.
"Brandon was just... swinging his arms. And I got in the way."
"Swinging his arms?" my father asked, his volume increasing. "Why was he swinging his arms in a hallway? Well what the hell for?"
Mrs. Thomas looked down when he raised his voice and shifted on the sofa, her tiny ankles crossed beneath her.
"So it was really my fault," I said, perjuring myself to my own father.
I did my best to affect a contrite expression, hoping the purple bruised patch around my eye would buy me some paternal sympathy.
Judging by his expression, it did not.
"God damn it," my father said, and shifted the beer in his hand from left to right, like a timer, as he pondered the situation.
Mrs. Thomas pursed her lips. Mr. Thomas grinned, slightly. And Brandon Thomas sat back on the sofa, his arms spread behind him, the dirty blond hair in his armpits fanning out.
I supposed my father considered the idea of a boy like me being friends with a boy like Brandon. That was the sort of thing that might straighten me out, he might have thought.
"Fuck," he finally said, signaling defeat.
Mr. Thomas cheerfully asked my dad if he could take a look under the hood of his car, to check out a problem he was having. It was something I wouldn't have thought to do, especially to someone as cranky as my dad was at the moment. But Mr. Thomas had correctly intuited that looking under car hoods was about my dad's most favorite thing, and checking out his fancy German car would be an enticement.
"We can leave the boys to patch things up down here," he said. Leading my father out with an arm around his shoulder, he summed up the resolution to the whole affair. "Boys will be boys."
Mrs. Thomas took her cue to take away the beers and to busy herself elsewhere in the house, leaving us alone.
I shifted awkwardly in my seat and then looked up at Brandon. "Hi," I said, as if meeting him anew.
He grinned, and his grin was gorgeous, all rose lipped and white toothed. He roused himself to his feet and stepped over to my chair. He looked around to confirm we were still alone and bent at the waist. Before I could understand what he was doing his lips were on mine, and his tongue was pressing into my mouth.
When he broke away, he licked his wet lips and mussed my hair with one hand.
"I... what..." I babbled, and as I did he dropped a fist to my crotch, massaging the firm mound there.
"You don't wanna?" he asked, smirking.
It seemed like some kind of crazy joke. Like I'd say yes and he'd laugh and his friends would come out of hiding. But we were alone. And I knew what I wanted.
"Yeah," I said, numbly, "I wanna."
He crouched down to unzip my shorts and pulled my tented cotton briefs up over my hardon. I gasped at the sight of it in his hand.
"Fuck, I knew you'd have a big dick," he smirked, shaking his head.
He spat on my dick once, and then two more times, working his spit and down the shaft, mixing it with my streaming precum. As he jerked me off my back arched, and I let my hips roll forward. Before long I was fucking his fist, as he muttered, "Yeah, that's it."
He looked up at me, his good boy smile all but dissolved into his mischievous sneer. Looking around the room to the stairway and seeing no one, he opened his mouth and took in my dick head, wetting it and then pulling his lips together to suckle on it.
"Oh FUCK," I moaned.
It was all so unexpected and happening so fast. And the terror of one or more of our parents catching us made it so much more intense. But even that paled next to the way he opened his mouth again to go down, taking as much of my dick in his mouth as he could, and working it up and down. My erection between the soft wet pillows of his lips, slick with his own spit and my surging precum, had never been so hard before. Had never felt so good before. Not even the first time I came, when I thought I was going to pee but didn't care because it felt so good.
After bobbing his head on my dick, snorting and gagging when the head nudged into his throat, he pulled off, smacking his lips as his eyes watered.
He stopped only to pull his bro tank off, exposing the twin mounds of muscle that made up his chest. His puka shell necklace set off his tan, his nipples were rosy against his golden skin, and the slight hair on his pecs was the color I imagined wheat to be.
"Let's get you off," he said.
He jerked my slicked erection harder and faster than I ever did, and my body spasmed in response. He was really doing it. Brandon Thomas was jerking me off. And the sight of his chest just past my dick was getting me so close. I wanted to cum and I wanted it to go on forever.
He pushed my legs apart to make space to get closer and held my dick to the center of his chest, between his pecs. Using his hand to close the circle around my dick he stroked it, rubbing his chest and up and down too.
I was so fucking close but also couldn't bear the thought of him seeing me do it, knowing how his face and tits got me off. But in the end, he was stronger than my shame. I grunted, "Fuck, oh FUCK," and my cock swelled. I shot a load right there, the first arc hitting Brandon's throat and necklace, the next close behind, and then a heavy surge onto his chest, as his gliding hand stroked it out of me.
As my chest heaved and my brain felt like it was spinning round in my head, Brandon leaned back and pulled his own shorts down around his cock. Even in my state I gasped at the sight of it, eyes wide. It was pale, pink even, and good sized, but not as big as mine.
He jerked himself off furiously. It was when he looked down at his chest, with my white streaks of cum against his tan skin that he grunted hard and shot his load. Some if it hit my calves, a sense memory that would get me off for many years to come.
We wiped ourselves off and Brandon suggested we go out to see what our fathers were up to.
A little while later we went home. My father seemed happy enough, though he'd gotten nothing from the visit but a beer and a chance to advise a richer man on his car.
This is a story I keep to myself, though it happened a long time ago.
At college I reinvented myself. I was just a tall guy with good grades, reasonably good looking when I relaxed enough to smile, which I did more as the months and years went by. I discovered I could work out in the gym as well as anyone else, filled out and became more sure of myself.
As for grades, those had never been a problem.
I met my husband not long after law school. We both started at the same firm at about the same time. We have a high-rise apartment with a bank of windows, overlooking the city. I still run and swim, and at last my long, lean build has made me the envy of other guys my age. A satisfying reversal of fortune.
On the Monday after the get together with Brandon and his parents, the last of the school year, at lunch I made my way to Brandon's table, where he sat with his usual gang.
"Thanks for having us over," I said. As if it had been his idea.
I tried to sound breezy and relaxed, though my heart pounded as hard in my chest as it had in the Thomas family rec room when he knelt between my legs.
He smiled but was quickly distracted by his loud friends. Seeing how they laughed together I stepped back, insubstantial as smoke.
I heard Brandon started visiting Vietnam, of all places, going back and forth overseas. I never knew why, but I thought he must have stood out there, with his blond hair and easy laugh. I lost track of him altogether at some point.
I've wondered from time to time how much that afternoon set me on the path to become an attorney, like Mr. Thomas. I never forgot the lessons learned in his rec room, or the allure of Brandon in his bro tank in reaching a deal. But as the expression goes, lex prospicit not respicit. The law looks forward, not backward
Even after all these years this is a story I don't tell my husband. It's from before our time together. Before I found my footing. He's a good man, but he doesn't need to know everything.
Some things are just between friends.
END